TES IV: Oblivion officially delayed (for both PC and 360, AFAIK)

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=7020

Oh well, I guess this should have been expected. If nothing else, I'm assuming the game will have fewer bugs that previous versions.

BTW, 2Q 06 for TT is Feb 1 to May 1, so I guess we should expect the game sometime then.

 

I'm not sure, but I don't think they ever gave out minimum PC specs yet for the PC version. IIRC, they were still optimizing the graphics engine, which can definitely determine the final specs. Just guessing here, but if your specs are good enough for some of the newer PC games such as Quake IV, FEAR, etc. (Pentium 2.5-3.0 GHz CPU or equal, ~1GB RAM, DirectX 9.0c video card with 256 MB of RAM), you should be OK. Of course, you may not get something that mirrors the 360 version, but I imagine it would at least run decently.

 

I probably have seen it, although I'm not sure which particular vid you're talking about. Not counting the Eyetoy demos from E3, I've seen 2-3 videos showing examples of what the PS3 Eyetoy could do. IIRC, one of them was showing how you could create a 3D image of something 2D and have it animate, such as a 2D picture of a person or even a pineapple. The other one I can think of was a demo that would take the face of a person and add certain things to it, such as makeup, hair, scars, etc. Although technically speaking, both of these were more demos for Cell and not really demos for the Eyetoy; the old Eyetoy could probably do the same with Cell. I think I've seen another one as well, but my mind's gone blank on what it was about..

Hehe...and if I didn't post all these game threads, I'd be more of a lurker as well...except for the occasional posts about O RLY owls.

 

Ah yes. That was what I was trying to describe for the 2nd demo (makeup, hair, scars, etc.). I read about it around Oct. 4th when a member at another forum I visit posted about it (he gets a lot of scoops on Japanese events). Here's that thread:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=24203

As he says, it took place during CEATEC JAPAN 2005, and that demo was one of two demos that Toshiba showed on their Cell devkits (the other being the 48 mpeg2 streams running at the same time). Seeing as how Toshiba was showing it off, it really isn't technically Eyetoy tech.

BTW, back to Oblivion, there might be a small glimmer of hope...really small. From what I read, the mods over at the official Oblivion forums are acting a little weird considering the news. Sounds like they are locking any threads about the news and linking to the FAQ that states "Holidays 2005" as the release date. Can't really argue with the official word from the publisher, but that is interesting to say the least.

 

I actually took most of those specs from the recommended settings for running a game like FEAR (which actually asked for 3.0+ GHz). Of course, those speeds were for Pentiums, which is why I threw in a "or equal." Haven't checked out the benchmarks, but I'm guessing you're Athlon XP2400+ runs just as well, if not even much better, than a Pentium clocked at 2.5 GHz...if they even make those.

I know the minimum specs are lower (like 1.7-2.0 GHz), but I'm guessing that Oblivion will require a lot more than that. I believe Morrowind would barely run on anything that wasn't top-of-the-line, and even on those machines, it would still bring the system down to its knees. I'm not sure how good Bethesda is at scaling their engines to the low-to-midrange PC; I know iD is pretty good at it, as are others, but Bethesda worries me a bit, especially since they may need a bit more CPU power than some of these other games (stat tracking, Radiant AI, world physics, etc.). Factor in that they are also trying to max out the capabilities of the 360 and the specs may be even higher (read Oblivion could be one of the 1st games to really take advantage of dual-core CPU's). I'm just guessing that if you can run most of today's graphics intensive games at max settings and close to 60 FPS, then you should probably be able to at least run Oblivion without too many problems. Maybe Bethesda will be able to make the game run well on lower specs, but I'm just giving basic idea of what to expect.

edit: I probably should have said "...if you can run today's games with ease" or something like that.

 

Haha...actually, yeah I do pretty well in my English/Rhetoric classes (usually A's). And I usually do have to write about something else like literature, military recruitment, media violence, the Nobel Prize, etc. and not something video game related. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I could write about video games instead.

Yeah, probably something like that. I just thought it was interesting, especially since apparently some of the members there even thought Take Two was lying and that we should wait for the official word from Bethesda. Plus, some of the Bethesda devs on GAF haven't said anything about it either yet, and apparently they already had some ads on buses in NYC. I wonder when the delay was decided; I remember reading about some bad bugs a while back (IIRC, a minotaur was supposed to protect a unicorn, but it kept killing the unicorn instead). Maybe the bugs were a lot worse than originally thought, not to mention whatever else they had to do (optimizations?). Oh well, I'll take a virtually bug-free version of Oblivion over one full of bugs.

 

Yeah, this is my first full semester in college (majoring in Computer Science), although I have experienced some college work before this semester with dual-credit and a UT summer program I was in. For example, I've already taken like 3 English/Rhetoric courses.

I haven't really given much thought to professional writing. I appreciate all the complements, but I've never quite pictured myself being able to do that as a first year college student in a new city (not to mention someone with no work history); I'm still more or less living off my parents from a couple hundred miles away. I guess maybe I can look into my options here at UT and see what's available. Now that you mention it, it can't be too hard to come up with some of the crap these writers write. I could probably come out with an article that speculates about a 2020 release for the Nintendo Revolution that sounds somewhat reasonable.